About Angela Butler

Hi! I'm Angela Butler. I'm a 19 year old photographer from Mount Pearl, Newfoundland, and I currently live in Calgary, Alberta. Cancer is what inspired me to do more with my photography, to create art rather than just photographs. I'm currently in my 2nd year of college at the Alberta College of Art & Design majoring in photography. My most current feat in photography is travelling to Chicago this summer to work with Aaron Nace and the team at Phlearn! I couldn't be more excited to be doing what I'm doing.

Hey everybody!
Sometime last week I got the news that I was selected to be in the top 10 finalists of Calgary’s Emerging Photographer! I’m in the contest with some amazing people! Quite the competition!
There will be voting for this contest online, and I’m posting simply to ask you guys to vote for me! 🙂 I won’t find out who wins until the gala on the 24th of February, and I will let everybody know how everything goes! 😀

I’m in my second semester of my second year of college now. I’m majoring in Photography at the Alberta College of Art & Design which is in Calgary, AB (Canada).
I’m taking a class this year that I really wasn’t so excited about (all classes are mandatory). It’s called Photographic Technology. Basically, film.

Most people in my class were super stoked about everything! Couldn’t wait to load film in their cameras and shoot! That’s not the thing I had a problem with. I love shooting with my Pentax Ashai K1000. It’s a beauty.Me with my Pentax in 2009

The thing that concerned me was how I was going to do in the darkroom. I have an extraordinary amount of allergies. 835 allergies. Yes, you read that right, 835 allergies. Some of which include silver (in the chemicals for developing) and much more. I also have asthma and eczema, so it’s really not so great for me to be in the darkroom. Most of my classmates, when developing, wear their normal clothes, nothing special. Me, on the other hand, I have to go into that room fully decked out.

Apron, long gloves, face mask, and goggles. Yep.

I’m happy to say that with all of this stuff on I was fine, and was able to stay in the darkroom, and develop my own film.
I scanned my test strips, contact sheets, and enlargements in to show you guys 🙂

So, first thing we have to do is put our film on this thing

It’s hard to explain everything step by step, especially since I’ve only done this 2 times so far, but I’ll try my best.
We’re given special paper (special paper, I’m obviously really technical) that can not be in the light or it is basically useless. We cut a piece of paper into strips for test strips and exposures. Put the strip of paper on the enlarger, put the strip of film on top of the paper and then expose it. You expose each thumbnail for a different amount of time. It can be in increments of points of a second (0.1, 0.2, 0.3, etc..), seconds, or tenths of seconds.

What you see here is an exposure strip. Starting from the right is 2 seconds, 4 seconds, 6 seconds, 8 seconds and then 10 second exposure.

My favorite of the 5 was the 8 second exposure. So now that I know that, I can expose an entire sheet of paper for 8 seconds with all of my film to make a contact sheet.

my first contact sheet

my second contact sheet

From there we have to make enlargements, which is basically a print of our image. In order to determine how long to expose the paper we have to do test strips and then determine the best exposure from there.
From the right to the left it’s 3 seconds, 6 seconds, 9 seconds, etc… All of these images that I took were done in extremely low light. Lit my lamps, cell phones, laptops, etc.. So, I went with a darker exposure just because it made more sense. For most of the images I exposed them for 12 seconds.

Here is my enlargements from on 35mm film.

I only enlarged 4 photos, so that’s what you guys get! 😀
I am no professional, especially when it comes to film, but this was definitely a lot of fun. I’ll probably still shoot film once I’m finished school, but after these classes I definitely won’t be making my way into the darkroom anymore, just because of my allergies and asthma of course. Developing film is such a different experience, it’s cool, and it’s definitely something I’m happy we’re doing in class time…but with that said I’m of the digital age, I am in the internet era! I’m not used to things happening so slowly, and I like results fast. It’s difficult for me to take things like this slow and pace myself but it was totally worth it. Also just want to say that I have shot color film before- once. This is however the first time I’ve shot black and white.

Next Photographic Technology class we’ll be working with 120mm film and medium format cameras, should be fun!

I haven’t really wrote a blog post before. I did when I was a young’in and writing on the website that was all the hype for all Newfoundlanders ( http://www.bluekaffee.com/ ), and I guess my posts on flickr and facebook can be considered blog postings…

ANYWAYS! Hello! I’m Angela Butler! Since this is my first time posting I’ll write a little bit about myself. I’m from Canada, Mount Pearl, Newfoundland, and I currently live in Calgary, Alberta. I’m in my second year of college in Alberta College of Art & Design, and I’m majoring in Photography. I’ve been interested in photography with an artistic eye ever since I was diagnosed with cancer in May of 2009. I always took photos, but not until then did I start to tell stories with my photos, and start to really pay attention to what I was doing.

My most current feat in photography is that I will be travelling to Chicago in 94 days to work with Aaron Nace and the team at Phlearn! http://www.Phlearn.com/

My first post here is for a few things.

1. To say hi, and introduce myself to all of you people who haven’t a clue who the hell I am! (I’m sure there’s a lot of you)

2. To upload a couple photos to show you from my current 365 days project.

This is my second 365 days project that I’ve done. It’s a bit of a weird project for me at this point. The first 365 days project that I did, I followed all the rules, and made sure to post every photo before 12:00. This time, in between my project I moved twice. Once from Mount Pearl to Calgary, and a second time from an apartment building to a basement apartment. Plus I go to college here, so I’m finding myself a lot busier than usual and with less time to upload a photo every day.

With that said, here is my most recent photo.

I call it “Going Places” [300/365]

It was quite a difficult one to create. This is a composite, and consists of about 12 different photos. A photo of me against the wall, a photo of the wall, a photo of each set of balloons taped together and held up by my lovely boyfriend, a photo of my shirt hanging, a photo of the windows (which I grabbed from Google), a photo of the clouds, a photo of the hardwood, and a photo of the baseboard.

*phew*

Here’s a before photo, or I guess I should call it the “base photo”

and here’s a photo of my boyfriend Jeromy helping me out with the shoot. Haha, he’s so wonderful, I always volunteer him to help me out with my shoots.

Don’t mind his shirt, I like V-necks a lot so he decided to cut his tank top….not exactly what I meant by a V-neck but close enough I guess. Haha!

It was a difficult photo to put together, but it was definitely worth it. It took about 2 weeks to do, with a couple hours put into it each day. For me, that was the most difficult part, just spreading out when I could work on it. I love to post photos, and share my work, so putting that off until it was up to my standards was hard. I also worked super hard on this photo because it’s going to be part of my second year photography class’s exhibition in February. I’ll post the poster for the show on this blog in a week or so I’m thinking.